this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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[–] Frank@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that was the Soviets. These are capitalists. Capitalists suck at war economics and I'm not even sure it's plausible under modern finance capitalism. I agree they're not likely to run out of troops any time soon, but I don't think we're likely to see economic gains like WWII.

[–] 420blazeit69@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also don't think we're going to see industrial development on par with WWII. My point is that during WWII:

  • The USSR suffered something like 25 million deaths, orders of magnitude above even the wildest propaganda about current Russian losses
  • They still had the labor power to not only run their industrial base, but to build much of it from scratch

It's a country of around 143 million, and I saw an (undoubtedly cautious) estimates of 11 million+ military age men. They had something like 1.2 million military personnel before the war.

Just a basic understanding of demographics and even one historical example should tell anyone that "they are so short on people they can't even run their industry" is absurd.